This is a transcript of the Rex Radio show of January 1991. Rex Radio was a monthly program on KPFA (Berkeley) hosted by Phil Lesh and Gary Lambert which presented new, unusual and "difficult" music - music that "falls into the cracks between the genres," as Phil put it. It was broadcast on KPFA from 1987 through July 1995. In the early '90s the name was changed to Eyes of Chaos/Veil of Order . David Gans produced the program from 1988.
REX RADIO - JANUARY 1991
Lambert: Good evening and welcome to Rex Radio. I'm Gary Lambert, and we're finishing off 1990 in appropriate fashion by honoring the recipient of the Rex Foundation's 1990 Ralph J. Gleason Award. And here to tell you a little bit more about the Ralph J. Gleason Award is Phil Lesh.
Lesh: The Gleason Award was instituted by the Rex Foundation about three years ago to reward outstanding effort in the less well-travelled areas of music. It's named for Ralph Gleason because in Ralph's career as a journalist in San Francisco, and with Downbeat and various national magazines, he was one of the foremost proponents of the more unusual and less travelled byways of music. He was a man with open ears and an open mind who could generally hear the best in any kind of music. An so in that spirit, we have in the past awarded the prize to Alan Lomax for his work in rescuing folk music from an early grave, and to Peter Apfelbaum of the Hieroglyphics Ensemble for creative work in melding what you might call a new kind of world music, with elements of jazz and popular music and various rhythmic structures of music worldwide - more ethnic music. And so in that same spirit, we're honoring this year David Grisman for his contributions to making a new language out of widely separated original elements.
Grisman: Thank you, Phil. This is quite a surprise and I don't know what to say. I'm flattered and honored.
Lesh: Maybe you could tell us who's in your latest band?
Grisman: That's a good idea. Well, I have a quintet this year. I have an acoustic bassist named James Kerwin. I've got a young man named Joe Craven who plays fiddle, mandolin and percussion, and very well. He plays just about anything, he's a very creative percussionist; for example, he plays a fiddle case and makes it sound like Shelley Mann playing brushes on drums...
Lesh: Outstanding.
Grisman: ...and a whole myriad of wonderful sounds from unexpected places. I have a guitarist, a young boy from Davis, California; Rick Montgomery. And this year I've added a new sound to dawg music, as I call it; I have a wonderful flute player named Matt Eccle (sp?). And me (laughs).
Lesh: We were just listening to some of that music a few minutes ago. It's outstanding to me how elements of music, rhythmic elements especially that you hear mostly in electric popular these days, are transformed in your context into totally acoustic delivery. It makes them sound more integrated somehow.
Grisman: Well, I've been an acoustic mandolin player for most of my adult life. I've always like all kinds of music. I got my mandolin training through bluegrass music, which I truly love and still like to play. But I always liked all kinds of music, classical music, jazz -- I listened to jazz for many years and never could figure out how to put it on the mandolin. For a while in the sixties I went out and bought an alto sax, because I figured to play jazz you had to play an instrument like the saxophone.
Lesh: There's a lot of truth to that.
Grisman: I just didn't have any chops on the saxophone. Then I met a guy named Jethro Burns, the late, great Jethro Burns, who was half of the Homer & Jethro team. Jethro was one of the world's great jazz mandolin players...
Lesh: That's an aspect of Homer & Jethro that I didn't know about...
Grisman: That's right, because the world wasn't safe for jazz mandolin players back then. (laughs)
Lesh: How is it now, man?
Grisman: It's still pretty dangerous (laughter) but it's....
Lesh: Incoming everywhere...
Grisman: At least a guy like me can make sort of a living playing the mandolin without being a comedian as well, or the world's greatest bluegrass singer, or something.
Lesh: So the instrumental area has taken on a new value?
Grisman: Well, I guess. I think what happened is that jazz music is largely instrumental and showcases instrumental virtuosity and that's alway's been a tough road. But I think there was a crop of bluegrass and acoustic musicians that sort of came up in the '60's and they had more to express than the eight bars that they get in each song, or the little kick off or the one instrumental per show...
Lesh: A problem, as the case may be. Also given the public's taste for vocals since the end of the Second World War, it's been mostly vocals on the radio...
Grisman: Well, I guess people are opening their ears, and I think it's just a better time for all music. It's not an easy thing to try and make a career out of playing an instrument like the mandolin with nothing else attached to it, but I've been fortunate in having good response for what I do and at a certain point in 1974 I found myself working in a band with Richard Greene, the violin player, and nobody could really sing very well so we decided to make the focus of the band instrumentals and people liked it. So then, of course, Richard got a job opportunity with Loggins & Messina; so he went and did that and I was left with the concept. And some young guys showed up on my back porch wantin' to pick...
Lesh: That's how it always starts....
Grisman: ...one of those guys was a young guy named Tony Rice, who was about the best bluegrass guitar player in the world, and he was living in Lexington, Kentucky and playing with a guy named J.D. Crowe in a wonderful bluegrass band, and he heard what I was doing and felt there was something there that he was interested in and just packed his bags and moved to California (laughter) and I sort of had a band show up. So I said, "Well, might as well..."
Lesh: This is a sign...
Grisman: Yeah, this is a sign. These guys rehearsed for four months before we ever tried to play a gig, and when we came out we had something that was different and...
Lesh: And it's still different...
Grisman: It's still different. (laughs) I've been real fortunate in attracting kindred spirits, because in lieu of money, success, etc., I can offer a picker a place to do his picking.
Lesh: That's what the pickers really like.
Lambert: That original David Grisman Quintet really was _the_ spawning ground for a whole new sub-genre of music which, for want of a better title sometimes just gets called "new acoustic music."
Grisman: Right
Lambert: There's really been an explosion of acoustic pickers who have burst free of the constraints of folk, bluegrass, or whatever label they've been hemmed in by. And your groups have spun off quite an alumni association. As a matter of fact, many players who have come through the David Grisman Quartets and Quintets have become leaders of pretty amazing musical worlds of their own.
Grisman: Right, they're now all my competition. (Laughter)
Lesh: Swell. Nah, they'll never replace the old master!
Grisman: I'm proud of them all and they all helped me do what I was trying to do...
Lesh: And you helped them, too...
Grisman: Yeah, I think we're still helping each other.
Lambert: We might mention some of those players include Rob Wasserman, Mark O'Connor, Tony Rice who you mentioned previously, Mike Marshall who's now one of the members of the Modern Mandolin Quartet, which is a pretty amazing group...
Lesh: A mandolin quartet?
Grisman: Yep.
Lesh: Are there such things as soprano, alto, tenor and bass mandolins?
Grisman: Yes, there's mandola, mando-cello...they even made a mando-bass, but it didn't sound very good...
Lesh: I can't imagine...it'd be like a guitaron (sp?) with two strings...
Grisman: It's like a giant mandolin. But the mando-cello and the mandolas are quite effective. The mandolin, of course, is tuned like a violin and so it corresponds to the classic string quartet. I even wrote a couple of quartets myself.
Lesh: Well, why don't we listen to some of your newest music.
Grisman: OK. Dawg '90, the disc with the dog on it.
Lesh: Aaaooooo...
Lambert: That's D-A-W-G for those of you taking notes...
Lesh: ...or those of you that can't spell...
(Music pause)
Lesh: That was a tasty chili dawg if I ever ate one (Laughter) So, who's playing on that now?
Grisman: Let's see, that's...
Lesh: That's the new group, right?
Grisman: Yeah, pretty much the new group [but] there's a different guitar player on this record. Got a new guitar player since the record. But essentially that's what we sound like now.
Lambert: And that is from the latest CD "Dawg '90," which I believe you have put out on your own label.
Grisman: Right, I have my own label finally, called Acoustic Disc.
Lesh: Acoustic Disc?
Grisman: Right.
Lesh: Is that available in stores or do you have to order it?
Grisman: Yeah, we're actually penetrating some stores. I think we have a few distributors now and I think we've got about 110 stores.
Lesh: So I could go to an unnamed record store and look in the bins, right?
Grisman: Right. I'll take care of you, Phil.
Lesh: Uh-oh. Better not say that on the air, Dave.
Grisman: Oh right, that smacks of something -ola. (Laughter)
Lambert: Disc-ola...
Grisman: Disc-ola, right.
Lambert: Well, since we've started off the show with the most recent David Grisman work, let's start reeling backwords through the years. This next piece is gonna be from a couple of years ago, I guess. A recording date you did with the great jazz violinist Svend Azmunson. Why don't you tell us a bit about how you got together with Svend. This is also one of the groups you've played in with a trap drummer...
Grisman: Right, George Marsh. Well Svend Azmunson was kind of a legend. Not too many people are familiar with him, but he made his first recordings around 1935, around the same time that Django Reinhardt and Stefan Grappelli made their first recordings. Svend was in Denmark doing the same kind of thing, although he's about ten years younger than Stefan. He's one of those guys that I used to scour the record bins for, because he made a few really great albums that were kind of hard to find, and I found a few of them and I never knew much about him. And I think in 1984 I was in Europe and I played in the Cafe Montmartre in Copenhagen, which is the famous jazz club there, and I saw an older gentleman, very well dressed, sitting off to the side in the audience. He looked familiar and I thought he was a newspaper reporter or something, and after the set he came back and introduced himself as: "Mr. Grisman, my name is Svend Azmunson," and I just about fainted; this was one of my heroes. And he was very nice and very complementary and he had travelled fifty miles to hear the band and I was just blown away. So I said, "Well gee, if you ever want to do any playing, if you ever come to the United States, look me up. And I got back a few weeks later and there was a letter from him and we started corresponding and ultimately got together and played some gigs. One gig was six days at a place called Fat Tuesday's in New York, a jazz club, and so I decided as I'd done in other cases, to bring a recording engineer and rent some equipment and recorded all six days and ultimately put together an album out of those tapes. And then later we did a little studio recording in Richmond, California here, and put together an album. Then I wrote Svend a tune in the tradition of a tune I wrote for Stefan Grappelli, "Steppin' with Stefan," I wrote "Svingin' with Svend." It's based on a lick that he played on a record in the Forties.
[Music]
Lambert: "Svingin' with Sven," from the title cut of the album of the same name, obviously. David Grisman with Svend Azmunson on violin, James Kerwin on bass, George Marsh on drums and Dmitri Vandeos on guitars. And, we're happy to acknowledge the arrival of a mystery guest -- come right through that curtain, sir -- a long time associate of Mr. Grisman and, I believe, the man who's good idea it was to bestow the Ralph Gleason award upon same. Jerry Garcia. Thanks for stopping by...
Garcia: Hey, guys...
Lambert: You guys go back a long way, don't you?
Garcia: Yeah, pretty long...
Grisman: ... a fair amount...
Garcia: ...'64 or somewhere around there.
Grisman: I ran into this guy in a place called Sunset Park...
Garcia: ...yeah, right, I remember it well... (laughs)
Grisman: ...in West Grove, Pennsylvania.
Lesh: A bluegrass festival, no doubt?
Grisman: Well, they didn't have festivals then, they just had these parks where every Sunday they'd have a couple of bluegrass bands playing. And it wasn't so far for me to go, being from New Jersey, but this guy came from out here.
Lesh: Searching out the bluegrass...
Garcia: Yeah, that was me and Sandy Rothman's big bluegrass summer adventure. (Laughter) It was fun. Anyway, we bumped into each other in the lot. I knew David anyway, by reputation, I knew people that knew him. I think Eric Thompson was on the East Coast somewhere...
Grisman: Yeah, Eric Thompson came out when he was about seventeen and slept on my floor for a while. (Laughter) Yeah, the East Coast bluegrass -- what would you call them? -- bluegrass groupies or -- city kids that were into bluegrass. There were the East Coast guys and the West Coast guys. We'd sort of heard about these guys on the West Coast and they'd heard about us.
Garcia: The country was much bigger in those days. (Laughter) None of us could afford cars to make that long trip from coast to coast, so that was the big breakthrough of the Sixties.
Grisman: And then I came out in 1965 and made my first visit to California and I stayed in a house in Palo Alto where you were living...
Garcia: Yeah.
Grisman: ...and Eric was living there.
Lesh: Dave Parker...
Garcia: Right.
Grisman: In fact, you know I got you guys your first piece of national press...
Garcia: That's right, in Sing Out magazine...
Lesh: Oh, that's right!
Garcia: ...our first national press.
Grisman: You were the Warlocks.
Garcia: David scooped the nation. (Laughter)
Lesh: "Look out for these guys!" (Laughter)
Grisman: As usual, I was twenty years ahead of my time. (Laughter)
Lambert: Are there copies of that issue of Sing Out still extant (sic) in anyone's collection?
Garcia: Probably...
Lambert: I'd love to come across that...
Lesh: It was just a little squib in column...
Grisman: Israel Young's column...
Lesh: "And David Grisman reports..."
Garcia: Right. Right. Right. "Our man Grisman on the West Coast..."
Lambert: This is the Israel Young who ran the Folklore Center in New York?
Grisman: The Folklore Center, right. I used to work for him.
Lambert: Well, since we've touched on your career as bluegrass tourheads...
(Laughter)
Garcia: You know, that's sort of the primary place where the Grateful Dead taper deal comes from. Some of the bluegrass places, the ranches, the farms and the bluegrass parks, they used to provide rows of outlets at the front of the stage and you could bring your Wollensack, or whatever you had in those days...
Grisman: I don't know if they provided them [but] we found them there!
Garcia: They had them, sometimes they had strips of them. At Beanblossom they had them...
Grisman: You're right...
Lambert: Sure, the taper scene goes way back...
Garcia: Oh yeah, in bluegrass that's...
Lesh: And jazz music, too, has that history...
Garcia: ...sure, of people taping...
Lesh: ...people with wire recorders...
Garcia: Right! Wire recorders!
Lambert: Fabled stories of Dean Benedetti (sp?) hiding in bathrooms recording Charlie Parker...
Grisman: Yeah, they just re-issued his stuff, the Dean Benedetti recordings.
Lambert: That's right...
Garcia: Too much! Really?
Grisman: I haven't heard them. But you know, he just recorded Charlie Parker's solos...
Lesh: Yes, I heard that...
Garcia: Wow!
Grisman: ...I mean, he would only turn it on...
Garcia ...for the solos?
Grisman: Yeah.
Garcia: Oh, incredible!
Grisman: And now it's like a six CD set or something.
Garcia: Unbelievable! I gotta get that...
DL: Didn't want to hear Max Roach, didn't want to hear Dizzy, just would turn it on for The Bird. It was a waste of the wire...
Garcia: Whoever was the guy who that recorded the Charlie Christian stuff? That's really a valuable glimpse. You'd never hear any of those guys blow in those days...
Grisman: Hey, it's the music that counts...
Lesh: Yeah...
Garcia: Absolutely!
Grisman: I used to make tapes off my little radio that I had strung together with rubber bands or something, and I used to be able to get Wheeling, West Virginia...
Garcia: Yeah, WWVA...
Grisman: ...in Passaic, New Jersey. And I got some stuff with Jimmy Martin and J.D. Crowe and Paul Williams...
Garcia: Fabulous.
Grisman: ...that's filled with fried eggs and everything else but...
Lesh: If you listen hard enough, you can hear it...
Garcia: It's in there...
Grisman: Oh, it's there, it's great!
Lambert: Well, having gone back to the bluegrass source of things, perhaps we should play something from the recent, sort of bluegrass reunion date you did called "Home Is Where The Heart Is."
Grisman: Right, a bunch of dates. We could play a cut with my old ex-boss, Red Allen, who gave me my first real job in bluegrass music.
Garcia: Yeah, Red Allen!
Lambert: Sounds great, why don't you name the tune?
Grisman: We could play "Teardrops in my Eyes"...
Garcia: Excellent...
[Music]
Lambert: "Teardrops in my Eyes" from David Grisman's "Home Is Where The Heart Is" album, and that was with, as you said, your old employer Red Allen and who else?
Grisman: Yeah, Red Allen, who was a great singer and guitar player and made his mark with two guys called the Osborne Brothers. The three of them created a style of bluegrass singing...
Garcia: Yeah, a kind of rough and sweet...(Laughter)...what a great combination!
Grisman: The high lead, Roberta (?) Osborne...
Garcia: Right, it's inverted differently than more traditional styles.
Grisman: ...and Red called me up one day, when I was going to college at NYU in New York, and woke me up around seven in the morning and offered me a job playing bluegrass music in bars and...
Garcia: (Laughing) Other nice places...
Grisman: ...and other nice places, which I readily accepted...
Lesh: "And you're gonna get paid, too!"
Grisman: ...which taught me a lot, too. They had a bus and the first job I think I played with them was the Wheeling, West Virginia Jamboree, and they'd take a bunch of musicians on this bus; some of them weren't even playing in the band. Guys like Jack Cook, or Porter Church was playing banjo -- he's on this recording, too. I was nineteen or twenty years old and I was just dying to play all the time and these guys were probably thirty-two or something and they never wanted to play. We never rehearsed, I was always trying to get them to play, but I learned a lot.
Lesh: Well, the two of you guys have been in more than one band together, right?
Grisman: Right, well....
Garcia: We really haven't played together as much as we would like to have...
Lesh: But you're doing something about that now, right?
Garcia: Yeah, we've been getting together and whacking around a little bit.
Grisman: I remember going to see you guys and you were playing some small club...
Lesh: Cafe au Go Go?
Grisman: Maybe it was that.
Lesh: That was our first New York appearance.
Grisman: I was in a rock band, sort of, in the late Sixties...
Lambert: Earth Opera?
Grisman: Right.
Garcia: Legendary band...
Lambert: And before that, were you in the Even Dozen Jug Band?...
Grisman: Yeah, that was my first...1963...
Lambert: ...with quite a few luminaries: Maria D'Amato, later Maria Muldaur...
Garcia: John Sebastian...
Lambert: Steve Katz...Blues Project (?)
Garcia: There were a lot of great people. Stephan Grossman...
Grisman: Josh Rifkin...
Garcia: ...the piano player. There were a lot of good people in that.
Lambert: So you guys obviously stayed in touch from that first encounter in 1964. And after a few small collaborations you played on the "American Beauty" sessions with the Grateful Dead...
Grisman: Right, that's probably what made me decide to move to California, because I was just...
Garcia: (Laughing) (whispering hypnotically) "David, come to California..."
Grisman: ...I was just out visiting and I ran into Jerry at a ball game, I think you guys were playing the Jefferson Airplane or something like that...
Garcia: Yeah right, one of our famous softball tournaments...
Grisman: ...in Fairfax, I think. And he invited me to play on that album and I figured "Gee, wow, stuff is happening here! I've just been here a day and I got a gig!" (Laughter)
Garcia: Yeah, David really added a nice quality to the tunes he played on -- "Ripple" and "Friend of the Devil" -- he just made the songs really work in that semi-acoustic setting that we had him in.
Lambert: Yeah, I was lucky enough to catch one of the shows at the Fillmore East where you sat in live...
Garcia: The re-creation, right... (Laughter)
Lesh: We bring 'em from far and wide, folks...
Lambert: Eventually, you came together in a band that harkened back to one of your old musical relationships, Peter Rowan, with whom you were in Earth Opera, and whom Jerry had known for a long time...
Grisman: Right, we were all living in Stinson Beach at the time and we just got together...
Garcia: Yeah, it was convenient, it was like the Stinson Beach...
Grisman: Bluegrass Irregulars.
Garcia: Right. The Bluegrass Irregulars.
Lambert: John Kahn, to whom Jerry has been married for many years...
Garcia: (Laughs) Yeah, right...
Lesh: Joined at the hip...
Lambert: And, at first, Richard Greene and later, by the time you got around to recording, Vassar Clements, the great Vassar Clements, in a band called Old And In The Way, a fondly remembered band...
Garcia: We had some great in-betweeners, too; John Hartford played fiddle with us for a gig or two...
Grisman: Yeah, that's right...
Garcia: ...and a couple of others, but Vassar was that final piece.
Lambert: Why don't we listen to some of that? From Old And In The Way's one and only album (and we sure wish there was more)....
[Music]
Lambert: "Pig in a Pen" from the Old And In The Way album which is now available once again through the magic of the compact disc. David Grisman, Jerry Garcia, Vassar Clements, John Kahn and Peter Rowan. Well, David, thank you so much for all the great music over the years and thanks for stopping by...
Grisman: Thank you, Gary and Phil and Jerry...
Garcia: Thank you, David...
Lambert: And Jerry, thank you.
Lesh: It seems that we have enough material to use David's music and these interviews for our next month's show, so we'll be back with David Grisman, on tape, from KPFA next month.
Lambert: So this is the final cut on the first David Grisman Quintet album from some twelve years ago, I guess, '77?
Grisman: I guess it was recorded in '76...
Lambert: So, thirteen years ago, and this was a real showpiece. It ended a lot of your concerts back then. It's a "major work!"
Grisman: Well, thank you. And I'd like to thank all the members of the Rex Foundation for bestowing this great honor upon me...
Lesh: You said that already, David....
Garcia: Mighty humble... (Laughter)
Lambert: So this is "Dawg's Rag."
Lambert: While we were listening to that we were talking about a band that you were in for all too brief a period called Muleskinner.
Grisman: Right, it was a band with Peter and Richard Greene and Bill Keith, the banjo player, and the late, great Clarence White, who was really one of my favorites. That band was actually put together by Richard, I think, to play a T.V. show, which we were just talking about -- it's sort of surfacing through the cracks, the videotape of it -- and then I guess somebody at the show wanted to make an album of the group so we played a couple of gigs and made an album. It wasn't really a group, I guess, but it was fun at the time and it's a great chance to play with Clarence White. In fact, Clarence got killed shortly after that record was finished. The last time I saw Clarence was putting vocals on that record. That's a real tragedy there.
[Music]
Grisman: The first recording of dawg music is on that record. We did two weeks of recording and at one in the morning the last night we got to play my tune.
Garcia: Yay! (Laughter) Anyway, the dawg music phenomenon is one of the things that's interesting about Grisman. He's invented his own kind of music which actually has which actually has schools of young players that play his kind of music. It's got its own energy and own direction and all that. It's pretty interesting.
Lambert: We mentioned earlier, a lot of people who have either been in David's groups or who he has been associated with on level or another have spun off their own little sub-genres...
Garcia: Absolutely...
Lambert: Bela Fleck's doing it right now, even as we speak, and Rob Wasserman is taking his music in very different directions. David's sort of the dad of modern dawg...
Garcia: Yeah...
Lesh: Poppa pop!
(Laughter)
Grisman: I just had a good ear for talent, boys (Laughter) and I don't pay those boys too good so they leave fast and I got to find another'n.
Garcia: It's the Bill Monroe formula, all over again...
Lesh: Miles Davis, too...
Lambert: I was gonna say, it sounds like an interview with Sam Phillips...
Garcia: Right, right!
Lambert: You were able to find players who were young enough to want to break form with the old ways. I know that Bill Monroe is kind of a stickler for tradition...
Grisman: I've always said that tradition always starts as heresy.
Garcia: Bill Monroe himself was a ferocious heretic in his time.
Grisman: Yeah, he was pretty radical in 1940. As you get older you kind of get set in your ways.
Lesh: Radicals just want to do it their way.
Lambert: It's sort of a constant in the history of improvised music that a certain number of people who have followed you are going to consider any new direction heresy. There are still people wishing Miles Davis would play "My Funny Valentine" for the rest of his life...
Lesh: Or still wishing that Bob Dylan still strummed an acoustic guitar.
Grisman: I don't think you have to leave anything behind. I still enjoy playing traditional bluegrass, which is the reason that I made that "Home Is Where The Heart Is" record. I think you can do it all...
Garcia: Why not? Wynton Marsalis seems to think he can do it all. He's doing a pretty adequate job of doing it all.
Grisman: If you enjoy it, I think that's the key, and if you respect it. If I try to play jazz it doesn't mean that I've left bluegrass behind, or that I think bluegrass is any less of a music.
Garcia: Or even that your bluegrass playing is gonna get any jazzier.
Grisman: Because basically I like bluegrass, I still listen to bluegrass. I just got a CD of the Stanley Brothers made from one of those live tapes from Rising Sun, Maryland. I still keep my head into that. A lot of people would think that I would play a lot of jazz stuff or some weird stuff in bluegrass, but when I play bluegrass I might be a little weird but it's basically played the way I learned to play it. That's what makes it the style. I think part of music is the styles and that part hasn't been studied or looked at as much as other aspects of music. There are a lot of styles, and jazz is a big word that covers many kinds of music. That's why I came up with the dawg -- actually that name, that was a nickname that came to me during my association with this guy (Garcia laughs). In Old And In The Way somehow we all ended up with nicknames...
Garcia: Right...
Grisman: He was Spud, I want you to know... (Laughter)
Garcia: And he was Dawg...
Grisman: And then I started writing tunes and it's hard to name instrumentals so I would call this "Dawg's Rag" or "Dawg's Bull," "Dawg-ola," "Dawg-ology," "Dawg-matism," "Dawg-alypso," it just helped me name things.
(Laughter)
Lambert: There was one album, one side of which was Dawg Jazz, and the other side was Dawg Grass...
Garcia: Something to hang your collar on...
Grisman: But it's basically sort a statement that this isn't jazz, ... People keep asking me, "Well, what is this kind of music?" Basically it's a lot of different kinds of music. I write tunes and some of them are like Latin tunes, some of them are swing tunes, and I don't really wanna just play swing, or just play bluegrass. What do you do with a guy who just wants to play all kinds of music?
Lesh: Don't ask him what to call it...
Grisman: They want to put you in a little compartment in Tower Records and that's been a problem for me, because sometimes I'm in bluegrass, sometimes I'm in jazz...
Lesh: Look for the sign of the barking dog (or dawg?)...
Lambert: The tunes you've chosen to cover over the years, too, have been from Django Rheinhardt to Coltrane in breadth, so that's a pretty accurate reflection of...
Grisman: I think it's just like Duke Ellington said: "There's just two kinds of music, good or bad," depending on what you like, I guess.
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